The owner of Birchbark Books as well as the author of the National Book Award winner The Round House and the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich assembled this collection of 36 short stories, spanning her career, at the insistence of her bookstore manager. We're lucky she listened to him, because these stories—whether originally published in magazines, as chapters in her episodic novels, or first seen here—beautifully evoke Erdrich's literary world. For her wonderfully drawn characters, the mystical appears amid the everyday, the comic can suddenly turn tragic, and violence and splendor exist side by side.

"The myths and traditions of a people, whether Chippewa or German, inform the rich cadences of her storytelling. Short stories also enable her to concentrate on individuals and the singular pain that comes from poverty or alcoholism or sexual despair.... Erdrich is one of our major writers: She illuminates large swaths of U.S. history and culture, and this volume is a good demonstration of her compelling stylistic innovations, not to mention her literary cunning."—Washington Post